The Mathematica electronic notebooks developed for Intermediate Lab (Physics 221) are available below along with a description of how to load them onto your computer. All of the notebooks have been tested on a Linux machine. If you have any problems send me email at ggilfoyl@richmond.edu

The Mathematica Notebook files contain ASCII text, and can be transferred by email, scp, or other text-file transfer utility. If you right-click on the file with a web browser you should be asked to save the file. Save the file as it appears with a name ending with ".nb" to allow Mathematica to recognize it as a Notebook. The file can then be read or edited using a copy of Mathematica or MathReader.

• introduction.nb Notebook that introduces the Mathematica computing environment and shows how to make a few calculations and plots.

• graphics.nb Notebook that introduces some plotting techniques.

• blackAndWhitePrinting.nb Some examples showing how to put multiple curves on a single plot using grayscales, dashing, line thickness, etc to distinguish among different curves. There are also examples of plotting multiple data sets on a single plot using different markers to tell one set from another. Useful for people without easy access to a color printer.

• histogramming1.nb Notebook that demonstrates how to generate histograms or frequency plots and to perform basic statistical analysis.

• plotting1.nb Notebook to show how to make simple plot of data sets with uncertainties, curves, etc.

• fitting1.nb Model building and testing often means fitting a curve to some data set. This notebook illustrated that method and shows how to extract uncertainties on the fit parameters. This notebook reads in data from the file rolling.dat

• NonLinearFitting.nb Model building often means fitting curves that cannot be written as linear combinations of a set of functions. This notebook illustrates a nonlinear fitting method, shows how to extract uncertainties on the fit parameters, and to make combined plots. This notebook reads in data from the file Nuke.dat It includes fitting with different weights on individual data points. The χ²(chi-square) is used to measure goodness of fit. NOTE: Be aware of the fact that MicroSoft IE appears to have the feature/bug of inserting html into the Nuke.dat file when you view it with IE. This means that depending on how you download the Nuke.dat file you may have to edit it and remove the offending html formatting commands before you can read it into Mathematica.

• Interpolation.nb This notebook demonstrates the use of the interpolating capabilities in Mathematica. This enables one to treat a set of ordered pairs (like a data set) the same way you treat an analytical function. You can do integrations, derivatives, etc easily and quickly.